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Trevor’s tips

·         Squinting is paramount.

·         Stand way back from your work often.

·         At the finished stage, go away for a while and you come back with fresh eyes.

·         Great pictures should be able to draw you in viewing either close up or further away.

·         Broken colour technique allows for optical mixing of warm and cool colours.

·         Place your work in different lighting to check for tonal qualities.

·         Sort your pastels into tonal groups with a warm and cool section for each group.

·         Put in the darks first – the most important thing is tone.

·         Be aware of the light source. Bright light warms and eats edges so they need to be softened.

 

Hints

Do you lust for the airy and light appearance of a watercolour, but in pastel?

You can achieve this effect very easily. Using white paper only, stroke with the broadside of your pastel across your paper (break it in half if the stick is too long). Vary the pressure. Use the darkest values first, lightest values last. Apply some of the light values directly onto the white paper and let the paper come through. Try layering complementary colours for beautiful effects.

Note – a disadvantage of this method is the tooth of the paper fills very fast and will not take too many layers as a result.

From Pastel Artist Canada.

Hints – by Alden Baker

Colour

  • If your work lacks beautiful colour, paint outdoors. The Impressionists taught us to see vibrant colour. Before them, painting was mainly tonal, the artist saw the local colour but not the subtle colour within it.
  • You can’t stare at an object to determine its colour. Your eye dulls when looking at objects in isolation. Normally, our eyes dart from one thing to another, seeing colour in a fresh way.
  • Always look at your object obliquely. If you want to know the colour of distant hills, look quickly at the foreground then back at the hills. The true colour will be revealed because you have seen the hills in relation to their surrounds. If you want to know the colour of someone’s hair, look at the back-ground, then back at the hair quickly.
  • When first studying nature’s colours, paint in strong sunlight, this makes the artist generally more sensitive to colour. You will find the darks are not as dark as you thought.
  • To test this theory, hold up a piece of black paper or anything black and you will see how comparatively light in value the shadows are.

 

Painting from photographs

·         After learning to see the fresh, vibrant colours in nature, you may notice that the colour in photographs is darker and duller then you realised.

·         It is better not to work from photographs, but if you need to, you will have learned that their colour must be enhanced.

The Finish

·         Have you captured the big effect, that beautiful something that inspired you initially? If so stop.

·         Have you examined your picture upside down to spot compositional flaws?

·         It is not always easy to know when a  painting is good, or when it is finished. Sometimes it is necessary to live with it for a few weeks before deciding.

·         Artists are frequently poor judges of their own work. An objective opinion can be most helpful, though not always what the artist wants.
 
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